Alie and carole both have been given tasks to sell the same product within the same geographic region.
Though the product is the same, both of them followed the same marketing strategy, i.e content marketing, SEO, social media marketing and so on. Still Alie has managed to close 5X more deals than Carole.
Do you know how?
Because Carole created the content around the product.
Whereas Alien created the content around her potential customers. She gathered all the information of her potential customers’ online behavior, i.e what they are searching for, what kind of content they are consuming, what kind of software they are using, how much revenue they are generating, what is the size of their company, etc.
This information helped her to curate the content in such a way that her potential customers engaged with her content and trust her that she can help them to achieve their goals.
Do you also want to close more deals like Alie this year?
Then you also have to adopt a customer centric approach and leave behind the product centric approach.
And for a customer centric approach you must have all the information that Alie gathered.
That’s when Intent data comes into picture.
Let’s understand what Intent data is, how you can collect it, and how you can use it.
What is Intent data?
Intent data is information that indicates a prospect’s level of interest in a particular product or service online.
It can be first-party data, collected from your own site, or third-party data, collected from other websites.
This data provides insights into the online behaviors of a target audience, allowing marketing and sales teams to understand what prospects are actively researching and which products or services they are interested in.
Based on the behavior of your target audience, intent data has been classified into 4 classes. Let’s see which are they.
Different Types of Intent Data
1. Search Intent Data
This data is captured when someone enters a keyword or phrase into a search engine, such as Google or Bing.
It provides you the insights of the underlying reason why someone conducts a search, helping businesses understand what their target audience is looking for. By analyzing search intent data, you can identify the topics your audience is searching for, allowing
you to provide the most relevant answers to their questions
This type of intent data is valuable for creating content that meets the needs of potential customers and can be used to attract and convert leads into customers.
2. Engagement data
Then comes the engagement data, that refers to the information collected from user interactions with your brand’s website, social media platforms, or email campaigns.
This data encompasses the information about for how long a user has been on your website, which kind of content he/she has consumed, what kind of content they have liked, shared and commented on.
This indicates the user’s interest and engagement level with your brand.
This type of data is critical for understanding the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, measuring the success of engagement strategies, and identifying areas for improvement
By analyzing engagement data, you can gain insights into how your audience interacts with your content and make data-driven decisions to improve customer engagement and satisfaction
3. Firmographic Data
When you recognize the brands that are interested in your service/product most by search intent and engagement intent data, you have to know whether they are the ideal customer or not. For that you need to capture and study the firmographic data.
Firmographic data refers to the types of information that can be used to categorize organizations, providing insights into their characteristics.
This data gives you information such as geographic area, number of clients, type of organization, industry, company size, annual revenue, ownership, and market trends.
This data helps you understand their needs and their financial capacity of investing in your service/product.
4. Technographic Data
When you want to understand the com[any’s technology used to improve targeted marketing efforts, enhancing B2B sales, you have to collect and analyze technographic data of your target audience.
Technographic data refers to information about the technology and tools that businesses use, including their technological stacks, the traction and adaptation of specific technologies and tools, and their IT infrastructure.
It provides insights into the technology purchasing habits, work processes, and the issues encountered by businesses, as well as what technology they may purchase next.
Technographic data is collected from various public web sources and can be purchased from reputable data providers.
You can use technographic data to create targeted campaigns, drive B2B sales interest, and make well-informed decisions for sustainable growth.
Now let’s see once you collect these intent data, how you can use it for your B2B business.
How Does Intent Data Works for B2B business
B2B intent data is a gold mine for the sales and marketing team. It just not reduces their efforts of acquiring leads but also increases the conversion rate.
Want to know how? By leveraging intent data in the following way.
1. Identifying Potential Buyers
B2B intent data allows you to proactively identify potential buyers who are actively searching for products or services that the company offers. With this you can target these specific prospects in real time, increasing the chances of conversion.
2. Generating Quality Leads
Once you know what your target audience is looking for, you can effectively create the content around those topics with increased engagement.
This helps in creating more leads and generating a consistent and repeatable sales pipeline.
3. Personalized Marketing Campaigns
By using intent data, you can create personalized marketing campaigns that address the specific needs and interests of potential customers, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
4. Informing Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Intent data can inform highly personalized, specific campaigns such as Account-Based Marketing (ABM), providing insights into which target accounts are actively in-market for the company’s products or services.
This information helps you to show relevant ads to the right people at the right time, and reduce your cost per lead.
5. Optimize Your Website
Intent data helps you know from which industry you have frequent visitors, and you can edit your content related to that industry.You can also create industry specific case studies that help the visitors to understand your service/product better and decide whether to trust you or not.
Collecting intent data is not a one time task, rather it is an ongoing process, and so that you need to analyze your website and keep on making the changes accordingly.
6. Enhancing ROI and Sales Growth
B2B intent data provides insights into a web user’s purchase intent, enabling you to identify when a prospect is actively considering or looking to purchase your products or solutions. This allows for informed, timely campaign responses, ultimately enhancing ROI and driving sales growth.
By utilizing intent data in these ways, B2B businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their target audience, improve their marketing and sales strategies, and capitalize on valuable sales opportunities.
Now let’s see how you can collect intent data.
How to collect B2B Intent data?
Intent data can be collected through various methods to gain insights into the online behavior and content consumption of potential buyers. Here are some common ways to collect intent data:
1. First Party Intent Data
This is collected from your own site, such as forms filled in for gated content, IP addresses collected from visitors, and data from subscription campaigns.
2. Third Party Intent Data
This is collected from outside sources and provides a broader view of a buyer’s intent. It can be obtained from third-party vendors who aggregate online research activity from data-sharing cooperatives, including B2B websites and media publishers.
3. Co-op Intent Data
This is collected by data providers across sites and provided to B2B buyers and sales intelligence tools. It can be used for lead generation and to identify potential buyers actively looking for solutions that your company offers.
Most B2B businesses collect the intent data from data providers. Let’s see some of the best intent data providers.
Best Intent Data Providers 2024
Some of the best intent data platforms for B2B businesses include:
1. Ampliz
Ampliz is well known for its accurate, real-time updated and compliant B2B contact data. Along with it also provides intent data. Ampliz tracks the past buying history and search history of your target audience, and thereby gives you search intent data. Along with this, it also provides you a 360 degree view of your target audience like demographic data, technographic data, firmographic data and so on.
It also provides you tech stack and financial stack information of your target audience upon request.
2. UpLead
UpLead offers comprehensive B2B intent data and has partnered with Bombora to provide access to highly accurate intent data directly collected with consent from Bombora’s proprietary data source
3. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a well-known intent data provider that offers a variety of features and settings to gain insights into customers’ behavior, helping businesses create more effective marketing campaigns.
4. Cognism
Cognism is a sales intelligence platform that provides intent data embedded by Bombora, enabling businesses to find organizations in their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that demonstrate real intent to buy.
5. Lusha
Lusha is a go-to-market business intelligence platform used by sales and marketing teams to find up-to-date, high-quality data.
Conclusion
Intent data allows you to sneak-peek into your target audience business process and help you to strategize your sales and marketing process.
It helps you effectively communicate with the right target audience at the right time. As much as Intent data, the provider of intent data is also important. You must collect it from the right data provider.
It’s the right data provider of intent data that makes the whole difference.
